After a no-drink order turned half a million Toledo area residents away from their water taps, the Ohio Agriculture Advisory Council of The Humane Society of the United States is urging regulation of factory farms. Animals raised in modest numbers on farms using intensive grazing management are less likely to cause pollution than animals confined in large numbers.

Bill Miller, HSUS Ohio Agriculture Advisory Council member and vice president of the Ohio Farmers Union said: “To have less pollution and begin cleaning up the lakes, we must have fewer factory farms and begin returning to a more traditional system of agriculture where animals are treated like more than mere production units. Our water, the animals, our health and our rural communities will all be better off for it.”

In Ohio, factory farming facilities produce vast quantities of manure and the majority of cropland on which all this manure is dumped is in production for farm animal feed: corn and soy.